Meta

Month: January 2009

Long ago I mentioned what I called “vertical analytics” and how blogs may be the next analytics frontier. Fast forward to the present, and blog analytics are “been there, done that.” (The product demo I saw in a hotel room at SES never saw the light of day; the originator went on to other things – and remains active in “general” web analytics.)

I still think vertical analytics is bound to happen. Witness Atlanta-based Indie Music, whose service Band Metrics — “Analytics For The Music Industry™”, scored angel financing back in November. More than one press report about the financing used a variant of the phrase “Google Analytics of the music industry.”

Compared with some of the graybeards of Business Intelligence, the Web Analytics “industry” has not yet left adolescence. But I think many of the lessons learned in the greater web analytics field, combined with more powerful machines and a greater “popular culture” around number crunching, are going to lead to analytics for very specialized fields. At a minimum, it might move us away from generic tools that look at the Web to tools that have specific knowledge of a particular business — kinda like a specific solution for scheduling & billing for dentists vs. bringing in Oracle Applications and Accenture. What can be bad about that?

Could this be a new analytics growth opportunity, or perhaps just a land grab? Here’s a thought experiment: check out XXXanalytics.com (where XXX is whatever interesting business you can think of) and see if it’s already taken. I tried a half-dozen while composing this post and I was surprised how many were already claimed…

(Interestingly, XXXanalytics.com itself is not taken, nor is dentistanalytics.com)

If there’s one thing better than having lots of data, it’s probably visualizing it.

I’ve been coming across new sites and new ideas for visualizing data, and thought I’d mention a few.

One of the things I love about the New York Times is their smart visualizations. The interactive graphic A Year of Heavy Losses was a huge hit last fall (even if the data was scary as hell) as the financial meltdown was unfolding. Treemaps can be difficult to understand, but this one nailed it.

Even the Times’ day-to-day infographics can be a pleasure to look at. Did you know that the NYT has a Visualization Lab where you can make your own visualizations? It uses the many eyes technology from IBM.

Jeff Clark over at Neoformix continues to produce thought-provoking visualizations, many full of beautiful insight, like this contrast of two speeches, and some, like his visualization of Obama’s victory speech, are just plain “hang on the wall” beautiful (politics aside). I spend way too much time at Neoformix. Rather than single out one post, check out his Neoformix Review 2008 and see if you’re not intrigued. Jeff also links to other interesting visualization sites and projects.

Infographics should tell a story. Seeing a map of the US with red and blue states doesn’t really give the full scale of how the election went. Mark Newman, however, does a good job showing how using the geographic area is the wrong way to visualize the data, and coming up with better suggestions.

The TheStatBot does various dives into data that doesn’t normally get the spotlight, such as what post-processing software gets used on Flickr. Here’s a Twitter Wordle they did of Leo Laporte’s various tweets:

And .. if you like infoclutter (and we all do, sometimes, right?), check out this dashboard!

Finally, if you’ve made it this far: not really a data visualization, but a fascinating time-lapse movie of a four seasons in one 40-second video.